Big Tits Zombie

I must admit that I can’t get enough of this current Japanese trend of ultra low-budget exploitationers, so when I found out Takao Nakano had put his hands to one I was more than eager to check it out. Nakano is perhaps most renowned amongst purveyours of perversion and sleaze for Sexual Parasite: Killer Pussy and his Exorsister series of films which are some of the finest live action tentacle-rape trash available. He has also appeared in front of the camera in quite a few pink productions and wrote the screenplay for the wonderful Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai. As the majority of his works are manga-based, they are consistently over-the-top, often laced with lovingly-lensed scenes of scantinly-clad women wrestling, which is somewhat of a “trademark” in Nakano’s work, having an active side-career as a girl-on-girl wrestling promoter. Anyway, to the film…

As should be expected there’s nothing too heavy plot-wise, it’s basically strippers vs. zombies. Each girl portrays a stereotype: there’s self-harming, Bataille-quoting Gothic Lolita Maria, badass tough-girl Ginko, Bangkok bargirl Darna, and out-of-towner leader Leena (played by AV Idol Sora Aoi). When the girls end up performing at a backwoods strip joint, they discover a hidden basement loaded with occult literature which Maria can’t resist browsing and subsequently reading aloud from one title: a 16th century Book of the Dead. Of course this causes a demonic well to spew forth multiple members of the walking dead thus putting Maria in her element as she transforms into the villain of the film by controlling the zombies to do her bidding, forcing her fellow strippers to fight for their lives.

Throw in some random spaghetti western homages, a fire-breathing vagina dentata, topless sumo wrestling, an intensely creepy Deep Roy-lookin’ dwarf, cheap CGI splatter (and some practical gore FX), Russ Meyer-esque T&A comedy, sporadic 3D sequences, plus plenty of Cosplay outfits and you have a fun way to blow 70 minutes. Nakao’s camera approaches the feminine form with a “hentai eye” you might say, as it hovers, ever-ready to zoom into an up-skirt shot or extreme close-up while the girls are being mauled to death.

The main thing that sets this slightly apart from other “J-splatter” entries is the 3D element, I’m actually surprised that (as far as I know) no one else thought of it first. For the most part the film is 2D, it’s only when there’s some stripping or zombies that a five second warning appears on-screen for you to don your glasses for some (often rather brief) 3D action. The only flaw with this is that your eyes can take a bit to adjust to the transition and once they have the segment is over. Still, it is preferable to the whole film being in 3D as much of it would be redundant.

While perhaps not as over-the-top as The Machine Girl or Tokyo Gore Police in regards to the amount of body-horror and oddities on display, Big Tits Zombie plays out as more of a colourful pop-art piece with a sprinkling of gore, overt winks at the audience and a few badly choreographed fight scenes.

There’s also a 15-minute behind the scenes featurette in which the actresses speak about how they approached their characters and director Nakano on the girls’ various attributes.